Individual-level poverty traps: My research papers in microfinance use contract theory and information economics to examine how microfinance institutions can be designed to help give households the wherewithal to escape the poverty trap. These are papers that focus on improving the design of microfinance institutions to alleviate poverty.

Country-level poverty traps: While we constantly use terms like infrastructure and public capital in policy-making, their role in modern economic growth theory is still not well understood. My research examines the role public capital formation process plays in and trapping countries in a low per-capita income trap and forgoing potential gains from productivity.

Infrastructure: While infrastructure is often seen as the solution to all problems, the definition of infrastructure varies from discipline to discipline. The surprising fact is that there is no universal definition of infrastructure in either academia or the policy-making world. In my ongoing work on infrastructure, I am trying to find a cogent definition of infrastructure from the first principles and aim to develop a functional taxonomy for infrastructure.

Markets: Like infrastructure, while the term market is often used across disciplines, its meaning varies across disciplines and contexts. What is striking is that the the relationship between markets and social space, as conceptualised by the philosopher Henri Lefebvre, is still not well-understood. My on-going research examines the relationship between markets and social space.